My “Inspiration 5e” app has two modes: “inspiration mode” and “exploration mode”.
inspiration mode
Inspiration Mode is the default mode. It’s for when you’re browsing for ideas to fill out a pre-existing or partially complete adventure. A random encounter in the jungle? A 17th-level treasure hoard? A ranger NPC? Whatever you want. If you like one of the suggestions, you can swipe right to save it for later. If you want to generate a new suggestion, swipe left. Inspiration mode is like Tinder for DMs.
Inspiration mode doesn’t presume anything about your adventure. It just presents ideas to you as fast as possible. It doesn’t ration out the interesting stuff: every location has an inhabitant, every monster has treasure. You loaded up the app because you wanted something, not because you wanted nothing.
exploration mode
Exploration mode is for when you want the app to design a whole dungeon crawl or hex crawl for you. Maybe your PCs ventured into an area you haven’t prepared; maybe you’re playing solo and want to be surprised; maybe you’re running a zero-preparation, all-improv game; or maybe you just don’t feel like doing cartography today.
In Exploration mode, you’ll get a map to explore: a dungeon, an area of wilderness, a city neighborhood, or the like. The map is hand-drawn, procedurally stitched together, and populated with interesting locations and encounters, with every monster, trap, and treasure hoard marked. If you like a map, you can save it; that can be a piece of your campaign world now. This is full Tolkien worldbuilding mode.
Unlike Inspiration mode, Exploration mode provides content at a measured pace. There is the occasional empty dungeon room or deserted hex. While many weapons and armor have cool powers and variations, sometimes the party will just find a plain +1 sword. Treasure is doled out at around the by-the-book rate so that party treasure will match the 5e treasure assumptions.
In other words, Exploration Mode creates something close to a by-the-book D&D campaign (with the addition of hundreds of new monsters, thousands of magic item variants, and tens of thousands of unique encounter details).
exploration in the dungeon
Let me talk in greater detail about what “exploration mode” looks like for the dungeon. This will be completely testable in the first beta build. (“Exploration mode” civilization and wilderness hex-crawl maps will be in a later beta release.)
In Exploration mode, you can generate a complete, procedurally-generated, multi-level dungeon.
Each dungeon level comes with an explorable map drawn in the style of my Random Dungeon Generator as a Dungeon Map poster (but on a phone screen instead of a 3-foot-tall poster.) The map is created with a modified version of the Dungeon Generator rules, though I’ve tweaked them to provide consistency: I avoid overlapping rooms, make dungeons’ sizes consistent and configurable, guarantee stairs down to the next level, etc.
I’ve also modified the official random-dungeon rules to make an Exploration Mode dungeon as much like a human-designed dungeon as possible.
Each dungeon level has a level boss, and the whole level has a consistent theme appropriate to that boss. For instance, a “death knight tomb” will likely contain sarcophagi and other tomb trappings, and will feature many (but not exclusively) undead encounters. The climactic encounter with the death knight will be a difficult one for your level.
Each dungeon level will feature random encounters, tricks, traps, secret doors, puzzling room descriptions, and everything else you’d expect from an underground death trap.
If you like a certain dungeon, you can save your party’s location and return to it week after week. You might fight skeletons on level 1 one week, and a few sessions later be fighting trolls on level 6, all within the same dungeon.
Inspiration AND exploration
Ok, so Inspiration mode is Tinder for DMs – swipe left for new ideas – and exploration mode is Tolkien for DMs – instant keyed maps of any part of your world. Can you have both together?
Well, apart from the fact that you as DM can, and SHOULD, overrule anything and everything that the app suggests, the software allows you to combine both approaches. You can “swipe left” in exploration mode to reroll any encounter or treasure. Get to the end of the Death Knight dungeon and decide you don’t feel like running a Death Knight? Swipe left to reroll the contents of the room! Now it’s a blue dragon lair or whatever. Or, if you have a specific idea in mind – say you really want to run a demilich – you can tap the Search tab, look up Demilich, and run that instead. Nothing suggested by the app is immutable: you know your game world best, and what you say goes.
Now all of this is how the app works today. As I implement more of my ideas, and as a result of beta testing, lots of the app’s features will change. Speaking of which: Why not sign up for the beta test! Within a few weeks, I’m aiming to have stable iOS and Android versions ready for you to test. Sign up for the beta test!
Your site has started to auto-download “explorationmode.mov” all the time. Stop it please. Google chrome
Oops! Fixed.
This is pretty exciting for me timing wise. I’ve got the PCs underground for the first time in a while and entering a kind of subterranean cross-roads. I wanted to give them a choice of a few different dungeons. There’s a plainly labeled “adventure connected to recent events is here” route I’m going to plan thoroughly, but I want there to be a few other meaningful options as well, without doing a ton of work. It sounds like what you’re cooking up will facilitate that. Looking forward to trying it out!